"All Ways at Once": A. R. Ammons, poet, and the poetics of his prose.

Joseph-Nicholas, Tessa

LITERARY CURATION IS AN INVISIBLE BUT COMPLEX ART, REQUIRING A delicate balance of scholarship, editorial skill, and an absolute commitment to the text. Curation provides shape and context, culls and selects, clarifies and illuminates, then--as it should--cedes the stage to its object. Kevin McGuirk's An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A. R. Ammons is both entirely loyal to, and in service of, Ammons's papers, legacy, and impeccable prose and also a striking and undeniable testament to the impact of truly skillful, faithful curation. McGuirk's selection reveals unexpected moments of interest, often in unexpected places. Among the treasures collected in An Image for Longing, Ammons's letters to his closest friends--many of whom were also colleagues in the literary world--figure prominently. One, a letter addressed to his then-editor at W. W. Norton and Company and lifelong friend, John G. Benedict, provides a particularly telling illustration of the complex interplay of Ammons's professional and personal commitments, loyalties, and identifications. Before closing, Ammons lingers to praise the backyard glories of his home in Ithaca, New York. In impeccable, delicate prose, he describes a pastoral vision so pure and uncomplicated that it's clear he's up to something. "The hollyhocks are a blooming," he exults, "the morning glory vine has climbed up on the quince bush again, and the first crop of roses and robins is complete. Come on up before drought sets in" (381). The sentiment is sincere, if strategic. The pleasures of the Ithacan summer are bait; Ammons hopes to lure Benedict upstate. The context of An Image for Longing suggests a longstanding campaign for visits on Ammons's part, which both men good-naturedly recognize as exaggeration; few real plans materialize, but Ammons persists, calling on all his powers of persuasion, issuing invitations with gusto.

This letter is also a striking example of Ammons's tendency to assert and align himself via shifts in his diction and dialect. He dons lightly the poetic and pastoral conventions of his 1971 letter to Benedict for the sake of their rhetorical effect (and quite possibly, to ensure Benedict understands the passage as jest). Having invoked the register, however, Ammons cannot let it stand: he corrects the situation in an instant with the affably rural vernacular of "Come on up before drought sets in," realigning his concerns from the pleasures of summer and leisure to the vulnerabilities of rural labor. The specter of drought serves to inject a sense of urgency--come soon or you'll miss it--but it's also an unsettled, superstitious moment, especially for one who, like Ammons, was born and raised on a family farm. Those whose livelihoods rely on the whims of nature learn to avoid the appearance of excessive bounty; they avert their eyes from the sun, lest the pleasure they take in it offends the storm. In this sense, we might understand Ammons's instinct to erase his celebration of summertime as a protective charm, an attempt to disguise his own bounty by acknowledging its inevitable destruction. Ammons knew well the ancient passages between science and superstition, concealment and revelation, thought and action, bounty and loss, as he knew that in Ithaca, every summer day is haunted by its own passing.

It is An Image for Longing that makes this close, contextual reading of Ammons's papers possible. The initial collection from which McGuirk culled its contents is truly vast, the majority of its documents loosely catalogued but unpublished. I remember it well, having spent one of my own Ithacan summers on a first attempt to catalogue the papers. It was the summer of 1998, I had recently completed my second year of coursework in the MFA in Poetry Writing at Cornell University, and Ammons, my thesis director, was retiring from full-time teaching. That spring, he had donated 26.4 cubic feet of his papers--most of a lifetime of journals, letters, manuscripts, notes, sketches, and more--to the Rare and Manuscript Collections at Kroch Library. A few items had already been placed on display during "Ammonsfest," a two-day celebration of Ammons's retirement and the papers' donation, but an enormous amount of material remained uncatalogued. As Ammons's research assistant, I was assigned the staggering task of imposing order on that remainder. The papers were stored without ceremony in a sea of white cardboard boxes somewhere in the upper levels of the Rare and Manuscript division, some labeled, some not, each brimming with papers and notebooks. Multiple drafts and carbon copies, smoothed-out cocktail-napkin sketches, and endless cross-hatchings and revisions spoke to the great care taken in the composition and preservation of each document: they were ready for, indeed expected, readers. I had my instructions--devise a taxonomy, go through the papers, file accordingly --a box of acid-free folders, labels, a pen, and very little guidance.

My single strict directive was to remove letters of a purely personal or sensitive nature from the main collection and file them in a separate box, to be opened no sooner than ten years after Ammons's son's death. In theory, the collection was meant to include only documents related to A. R. Ammons the poet, not Ammons the private man. Unfortunately for my meager skills as an archivist, Ammons's life and work were a single, dense fabric that strongly resisted unraveling; so few of the letters were "purely" anything, and I never knew how high to set the bar. Yet facing the inextricability of Ammons's professional and personal lives is essential to any attempt to consider his work in the context of the life revealed in the papers, one immersed in the literary, academic, and publishing communities on levels both public and private. That the industries supporting those communities have since been irrevocably transformed or forced into extinction only increases the collection's value as historical record.

Happily, McGuirk is both ideal reader and gifted editor. In An Image for Longing, his precise, insightful curation grounds the reader's experience in the crucial narratives of Ammons's writing life as he told them, preserving their historical context and literary richness. The foundations of his editorial approach are both practical and effective: he limits his selection from the papers to the two kinds of documents most well-suited to narrative structure, letters and journal entries, and he includes only documents written between 1951 and 1974. An Image For Longing begins just prior to the first, self-published appearance of Ommateum, and it closes shortly after Collected Poems 1951-1971 and Sphere: The Form of a Motion were released by his longtime publisher, W. W. Norton. These formal choices frame and reflect the volume's guiding narrative. Although the specifics of its chronology may at first suggest a familiar story--immature, melancholic, frustrated young artist struggles toward artistic and intellectual maturity, widespread acclaim, and professional success--An Image for Longing is no Portrait of the Artist. In his Introduction, McGuirk has it thus:

   What Ammons's letters ... provide is a portrait of the poet's
   varied and evolving engagements, what he avowed and what he
   disavowed, on his journey to understand, not nature, but the human
   sphere.... [his] preoccupation with a cluster of philosophical
   questions--and ... relations with others in their difficult,
   despoiled world, which he shared. (xi)

The distinction is subtle but crucial: McGuirk is concerned with Ammons's articulation and development of the questions and relationships that would shape his poetics, and the narrative follows Ammons's encounters with those questions and relationships. Details of the practical and material life of Ammons the man, mentor, and public figure cannot be separated from those encounters, but the volume's organizing ethos is intellectual, not biographical.

McGuirk divides the volume into five parts, each addressing a span of years. The section titles simply state those dates, while their subtitles reflect the growing range of Ammons's professional activities and publications. Part 1, 1951-1956, is subtitled "Berkeley; New Jersey; Ommateum." Part 2, 1956-1961, covers only "New Jersey." Part 3, 1961-1963, treats "New Jersey; Expressions of Sea Level; Cornell University and Ithaca." In Part 4, 1964-1969, we have more movement: "New Jersey; Ithaca; Cornell; teaching; Corsons Inlet, Tape for the Turn of the Year, Northfield Poems, Rome." The first entry of Part 5, 1969-1974, is the only individual correspondent assigned the status of category in the volume: Harold Bloom, whose friendship and professional relationship would help shape the direction and reception of Ammons's work for the rest of his life. "You've practically made me famous," Ammons tells Bloom in 1973, "famous enough" (408). Ammons's letters to Bloom contain some of the most philosophically challenging and tenderly intimate moments in the collection: consider the multiple registers of affection, admonishment, and professional positioning when Ammons declares to Bloom, also in 1973,

   I wish people would bicker about us more, your theory and my verse.
   It would keep the air of my love for you purified all the time.

   Well, I wish you would move your theory away from the philosophical
   and religious and more into the anthropological, political,
   secular, body politic. (410)

The remaining subtitles of that section also indicate the expansion then taking place in Ammons's career, with "Uplands', Briefings', Collected Poems 1951-197T, Sphere: The Form of a Motion."

Among other things, An Image for Longing is a study of voice, from Ammons the young, self-fashioned poet to Ammons the "famous, famous enough." The keenness of McGuirk's eye is evident in the selections he chooses to demonstrate this process. The volume opens with the 1951 journal entry of a self-conscious, self-doubting, moderately self-involved young man, with all the pretension and hyperbole that generally attends such speakers. He exclaims "'Nfaith.... 'Sblud!" for emphasis; he refers directly to the imagined future reader of his journals; he names himself a "wretched" and "unfortunate fellow" and laments, "What a price rebellion exacts!" (3). (Only two weeks later, however, there are intimations of the poet's later, mature aesthetic: "Give me something that is perfectly plain, give me an experience, no more truths" [4].) In contrast, the letter from Ammons to Bloom that McGuirk chooses --doubtless with a wink--to close the volume is brief, straightforward, affectionate but businesslike, signing off, "Why doesn't one keep one's mouth shut?" (426). Another, later excerpt from a never-sent missive, "To a Rabbi," demonstrates the relative ease with which Ammons has learned to articulate the principles driving his late poetry, which leaps between registers bawdy and elegant, scatological and cosmic, philosophical and profane: "all perception, all recognition is holy. Poetry will go into the temple and pay attention and sing, but it will go out the door ... and pay as much attention to dogs on the street..." (398).

The materiality of An Image for Longing--its presence in the world as a book--is substantial and deserves mention. A chunky sheaf of high-quality cream-colored pages bound in simple, sturdy paperback, the volume extends McGuirk's scrupulous fidelity to Ammons's aesthetic. McGuirk credits much of this quality to his publishers, ELS Editions: "The press is not for profit, and has an old-fashioned commitment to producing nice, though not precious, objects." "Nice, though not precious" captures this quality precisely: the volume's unique design and high production values make it suitable for gifting or collection, but the less-than-pristine copy at the bottom of my backpack remains just as striking. The idea for the cover design, which revives the image that appeared on the first issue of Ommateum, was McGuirk's. Its central image is a sketch Ammons's friend John Grenier made of a piece of Mexican pottery in Ammons's collection. "I wanted something different, partly because I thought a reading of the letters and journals might yield a very different sense of the poetry," McGuirk explains. "The drawing of the odd object on the cover seemed suggestive, too, in connection with the title I'd chosen for the volume, An Image for Longing, with its hornlike extensions reaching in different directions."

The intended purpose of this "odd object," if it had one, is a puzzle. (Although sometimes the puzzle is the point: Ammons's poems, too, intentionally complicate the idea of utility.) From a central hub which a perfect punched-out circle reveals as hollow, four horn-like extensions radiate outward in the cardinal directions, each widening like a bell to an open end. Its surface appears unfinished, rough. It is the compass of a poetic persona widening in all directions at once; it guides and amplifies, arms flaring into trumpets or bullhorns, the morning glories that would scent an Ithacan summer. The perfect O at the lip of each bell anticipates and echoes the poet's repeated "oh" throughout Ommateum. a cry of perception and wonder and intensity and surprise and recognition. The reader of An Image for Longing who returns daily to its cover image will find that its resonance shifts and evolves with Ammons's preoccupations. It is a literal "image for longing," but it is also a sort of key, a locus at which Ammons's evolving poetics and engagements can be articulated, if not simplified.

Yet Ammons's poetry and correspondence of that period expresses a deep ambivalence about the value of simplicity. In a 1955 letter, he begged Chris Knoeller, "pray multiplicity for me. Do not let me weaken and go one way, believing one philosophy, living in one aspect, until I am able to go all ways at once (clearly impossible--hence insanity must result)" (77). In his poetry, Ammons remains in motion, forever in transit between magnetic poles both observed and created: unity and multiplicity, retraction and expansion, connection and distance, intimacy and longing. The letters and journals illuminate Ammons's own sense of his poems as artifacts of those processes--processes that preceded and would continue without him or his poems. "The hardest thing to keep in mind," Ammons wrote to Bloom in 1973, "is that poems ought to be about whatever one is thinking, the way one is thinking" (420). An Image for Longing invites us to consider Ammons's poetry in just that way, as Ammons himself considered it: traces on the ever-shifting movement of thought. As such, it challenges us--as Ammons's work so often did--to reflect on the forces that compel us, the poles that draw us, the creative bounty of our own passages: poem and letter, poet and person, stillness and motion, summer and winter, thought and form, language and silence. And so we join Ammons in motion, and his poems open to us yet again. They tell us something different this time, but as always, it is a revelation.

Works Cited

Ammons, A. R. An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A. R. Ammons, 1951-1974: Ommateum to Sphere. Ed. Kevin McGuirk. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2013.

McGuirk, Kevin. "RE: on 'An Image for Longing.'" E-mail to the author. 15 Sept. 2015.

TESSA JOSEPH-NICHOLAS

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill